Monday, November 3, 2008

Re: Black and White

I've just finished reading Linus' blog post entitled Black and White and I have to agree.

It's not productive to be anti-something, it is much healthier and more productive to be for something.

I think Linus' article ties back into the How To Survive Poisonous People presentation I linked to and commented on back in June.

Very often times, the poisonous people in a community are those who try to make everything black and white and typically take the anti approach to things.

We all do it from time to time (myself included, *cough*), but the truly poisonous people are the ones that can't ever let things go.

4 comments:

Barry Kelly said...

The world isn't black and white, but don't underestimate the value of "strong opinions weakly held". It's too easy to just shrug your shoulders and say "the truth is somewhere in between", if you don't take the time to apply rigour and follow each path to its logical conclusions.

A dialog between thesis and antithesis is one way of achieving a synthesis, but you really do need to trace out some of the extremities to make it work - in particular, to find the weaknesses of the views you're stretching, to find their points of absurdity and failure.

Jeffrey Stedfast said...

Agreed, you have to consider both sides to arrive at a balanced view.

Артём Вахитов said...

But is it productive to be anti-poisonous-people?

Jeffrey Stedfast said...

Artem: No, it's not productive even when being anti-poisonous-people.

It's not productive to allow anti-ness to consume you no matter what the cause.

Code Snippet Licensing

All code posted to this blog is licensed under the MIT/X11 license unless otherwise stated in the post itself.